Storm victim identified; tree fell on his trailer in Scott, near Lafayette

P.C. Piazza, The Daily Advertiser/The Associated PressA storm knocked this tree down Thursday in a subdivision north of Crowley.

Powerful thunderstorms swept across Louisiana on Thursday, producing possible tornadoes and high winds blamed for one death, damage to homes and the destruction of a church.

Ryan Hebert, 44, was killed and his wife injured when part of a tree fell on their trailer, Scott police said. Their 15-year-old son called 911.

Damage in the area was isolated to two homes hit by a single tree, said Capt. Kip Judice of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office.

In Whiteville, a farming community north of Opelousas, a possible tornado demolished a Catholic church several hours before a Christmas Eve Mass was scheduled to start, said Jimmy Barbonne, spokesman for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office.

"All they had left was pieces of lumber laid out flat," he said. "Nothing was left standing."

The storm also damaged a nearby vacant home and toppled trees in the area. No injuries were reported.

Near Crowley, about 30 miles west of Lafayette in south Louisiana, several homes in a subdivision were damaged and some destroyed by a possible tornado, said Maxine Trahan, a spokeswoman for the Acadia Parish Sheriff's Office. Trahan said two people were treated for minor injuries.

Ken Graham, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Slidell, said a cold front had moved through Lafayette by late morning and was near Baton Rouge, pushing a line of dangerous tornado-spawning thunderstorms ahead of it. The weather service had been issuing tornado warnings -- many for rural stretches of the state -- throughout the morning.

All of southeast Louisiana was under a tornado watch until the squall line moved on, he said.

The storms came just over a week after drenching rains caused flooding in parts of southeastern Louisiana and produced one of the wettest months on record for the New Orleans area.

And there's still more December to go, and more winter in which the current El Nino weather pattern is expected to bring more of the same wet, cool conditions to the region.

"With all that rain we've had, it's not going to take a lot of wind to blow down trees," Graham said. "That's our big concern, about trees coming down on homes and cars and really hurting people."

Scores of people worked in the rain where St. Peter's Resurrection Catholic Church had stood in Whiteville, clearing the road, restoring headstones and salvaging statues and other pieces from the wreckage.

"Those people out there who came together in the rain -- that's the church," said one of them, Debbie Ventre.

Earl McCauley said he was drinking coffee when the television went off.

"I looked out the window and I could see fire flying off the transformers," McCauley said. "Then I heard the noise, it was unbelievable."

In less than two minutes, the church and one of his two grain silos were gone. The other silo and his two tractor-trailers were badly damaged. But his house near the church still stood.

McCauley and his friends put a blue tarp over the remaining silo in an effort to save his rice crop. The largest piece of the other silo lay in a nearby bayou.